> Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways:
> 1. The attitude of the "I" towards an "It", towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.
> 2. The attitude of the "I" towards "Thou", in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.
We need to learn to relate to Nature as I-Thou (not I-It.) The vast majority of our problem right now is our divorce from Nature and our attempt to relate to Her as I-It.
The good news is that it's fun and easy to return to Nature (and, as Geoff Lawton says, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden.)
I recommend Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos: http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/ esp. "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture".
The problem with Permaculture is that it takes the classic "Anecdote is not data" misconception and turns it into a design philosophy. This can lead to some serious problems and you end up with a design philosophy that is completely divorced from the science.
For example, some of the key components of Permaculture Design - the use of nitrogen fixers and dynamic accumulators - stand on shaky ground. They're based on a limited number of studies. It's not clear whether dynamic accumulators actually add any nutrients to the soil. And for nitrogen fixers, it's not at all clear that the nitrogen they fix is available to the plants around them. It might not become available until they die back and rot.
This "personal observation" basis of the design philosophy that replaces careful experimentation leads to some pretty disasterous results - like Permaculturists being extremely laissez-faire about invasive species (which, after climate change and habitat loss is one of the top contributors to the loss of biodiversity world wide). I once heard a leading Permaculturist give this really fantastic lecture about the law of unintended consequences as it relates to human engineering, and then completely write off the risk of introducing invasive plants through novel ecosystem design. I mean, it's the same damned arrogance and mentality, just using plants in mimicry of nature instead of metal to dominate it.
So, personally, I've stopped encouraging people to listen to permaculturists. Permaculture is not the answer. Agroecology, however, the core kernel of Permaculture thought re-integrated with science, that holds _a lot_ of promise.
You make a good point, and I often substitute "applied ecology" to try to emphasize the scientific grounding that Permaculture originally had (Bill Mollison was an ecologist) and still has for a lot of people, myself included.
But I have to admit, I was once laissez-faire about non-native invasive species. I can thank E. O. Wilson for writing a thing that set me straight.
(I gotta add that the "Permaculture Designer's Manual" is IMO one of the finest guides to design (any design, not just farming) that I've ever read. FWIW)
> And for nitrogen fixers, it's not at all clear that the nitrogen they fix is available to the plants around them. It might not become available until they die back and rot.
Do you mean it’s a question of if they provide more nitrogen then they use themselves? I literally just read from a children’s book in the nitrogen cycle about how bacteria that live on the roots of some plants are the only way plants can access it.
As far as plants, I think its a mistake to anthropomorphize them like this. They have no ability to enter into an "I Thou" relationship because they have no concept of "I". Modern philosophies that disregard the special place in nature of Man, and deny Man's nature, are a mess and lead to some pretty horrible outcomes, such as the dehumanization of undesirable groups.
>Modern philosophies that disregard the special place in nature of Man, and deny Man's nature, are a mess and lead to some pretty horrible outcomes, such as the dehumanization of undesirable groups.
I don't see the line of thinking from anthropomorphizing plants to dehumanizing humans.
If anything the experience of getting in touch with Nature forms a powerful and undeniable basis for loving other humans, due to our shared existence within the unifying web of life.
In any event, I'm not anthropomorphizing plants, quite the opposite: I'm pointing out that humans are the anthropomorphization of the ambient natural "processing power" of living intelligence.
Without getting into to metaphysics of identity and the subjective "I"†, there is a result in cybernetics to wit: "every good regulator of a system must be (contain) a model of that system." Ergo, in a system under evolution we should expect models of systems to appear in those systems. In other words, a self-concept (of some kind) should develop in any stable evolving system.
So you have a system that includes many "I"'s and each of them is "running on" the same biological "wetware", so it's really not at all strange that they can communicate with each other, eh?
From my POV, this is filling in the scientific story for phenomenon that are common knowledge. There has been to time or place in human history without some people understanding and practicing the I-Thou relationship with Nature.
†(Gurdjieff distinguished humans from animals and plants as being "Three-brained" beings, as contrasted with "Two-" and "One-brained" beings.
Unity of the subjective "I" and God is a foundation of, e.g. Hinduism: "Atman is Paramatman." That "I" of consciousness is the "I" of all beings, including plants, animals, and ecosystems, as well as the Whole Earth.)
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Er, FWIW...
> To cut the story short: By speaking in the first person we can make statements about ourselves, answer questions, and engage in reasoning and advice in ways that bypass all the normal methods of discovery. As a result, we can participate in dialogues founded on the assurance that, when you and I both speak sincerely, what we say is trustworthy: We are “speaking our minds.” This is the heart of the I-You encounter.
This is incorrect. Scruton has failed to sound the depths of "I-Thou", "a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds". There is nothing linguistic in it. No boundary. As an example, consider that you can be in the "I-Thou" relationship with an infant.
> We need to learn to relate to Nature as I-Thou (not I-It.) The vast majority of our problem right now is our divorce from Nature and our attempt to relate to Her as I-It.
It was the I-It relation that enabled science. Before that, nature was full of myth and divinity and thereby inscrutable. After the scientific revolution, nature became it, subject to laws and open to manipulation for our benefit.
Going back to an I-Thou relationship with major would be a huge step backward and harmful to humanity.
You're right! I imagine that if we did just "go back to Nature" we would forget and do this all over again in a few thousand years, eh?
We need a new synthesis that incorporates our scientific knowledge with the deeper reality around us. That's exactly why I find TFA and Levin's work so fascinating: science is discovering that life thinks, which discovery then forms a bridge between the "mystic" experiential communing with nature and the "hard" rational-materialistic science.
On top of that, aren't there a bunch of studies or something that says our microbiome can affect emotions as well as what kinds of food we like to eat?
> Is that an _emotional_ response? I guess it is. But I can hear my botanist side saying, “That’s not an emotion. That’s just a response.” But I think we can draw these parallels. It comes down to language again, to how we apply this language to look at these responses in plants. ... [W]hen you go and whack off the top of a plant ... Its genes respond. It starts producing these chemicals. How is that different than us all of a sudden producing a whole bunch of norepinephrine?
> Indigenous people have long known that plants will communicate with each other.
This is... postmodernist in the colloquial sense, and then straight-up Noble Savage theory?
I truly believe that we can't fuck-yea-science ourselves into better respecting and spending more time with trees and nature. This will never catch on, and I hope I'm right.
A company in No.Cal. (Santa Rosa) specializes in forest therapy. I think they've been expanding and doing special trips to places like the forest in Costa Rica.
What is intelligence anyways? We tend to define it based on ours. But how about collective intelligence? Other forms of intelligence?
More specifically, there are two things that bother me with the way we usually look at intelligence: time scale, and individuality.
To assess intelligence, we often look at individuals, not at the group. And we tend to do it on our own time scales. But I wouldn't be surprised if the "individual" you have to assess is the ant colony, not the ants themselves. And who is to say that rocks aren't smart? Have you observed them over hundreds of millennia? (I'm just kidding about the last one, though the question is still theoretically valid).
DUNE has a perfect example for those familiar. The most intelligent being can see multiple timelines and can shape civilizations over millenia. The more intelligent you are the more you can predict the future and plan accordingly. This isn't to say trees or plants can't be intelligent, but I think in order for that to happen the amount of information processing would have to be comparable, so maybe at best some slow, distributed process that has triggers more so than an internal model of the world.
I am wondering if this question puts the cart before the horse. Can we first ask: why is intelligence the thing that makes a living being valuable and worthy of respect? What about being a part of something bigger than itself? Being consistent, strong, rooted, and durable? Being non-judgmental or generous? Happy to exist in stillness right where it is?
From the Tao Te Ching to Chris Arnade's "Dignity" I really have found many reasons to become disillusioned with "intelligence" as a virtue.
A few years ago I came accross Systems Theory[1] that seems to explain phenomena (like ant colonies) quite well. But I think they call "systems of higher order" or "emergence", not collective intelligence.
Thank you, I will try to read them when time permits. I forgot to mention evolution in my post, but that's part of the point. Our genes seem like a very long-term memory, trough them species (including ours) can learn new strategies over millennia.
I asked my father the very thing I wrote above, and he answered that intelligence was the ability to reuse previously acquired knowledge in a given context. Which would seem fitting, if a bit stretching.
Leo Gura of Actualized.org has a really great lecture on what intelligence is that sort of breaks the bounds of other previous explanations of intelligence I've heard.
I only post this because it's a direct answer to the question, What is intelligence, and I find it to be a rather deep explanation compared to many others.
There are all kinds of intelligence. What is unique about human intelligence, which has been known since Aristotle, is our ability to recognize abstractions and make generalizations, which then leads to human language. Various plants and animals might react to red things, but we can abstract red as a color, thinking and talking about it as separate from the things that are red.
What you say has been "known since Aristotle" appears to be wrong. There is really no evidence that this ability, or any cognitive ability, is "unique to humans". Yes, humans have more of this ability to "recognize abstractions and make generalizations" than pretty much any other species on this planet, but it is not unique to humans. In the contrary, there is lots of evidence that generalization and some amount of abstraction are fundamental to all forms of problem-solving (and "all life is problem-solving") and that the fundamental neural mechanisms that lead to these capacities are no different in quality between different species, just in quantity. This is being demonstrated in objective research again and again... there is no cognitive capacity we humans have that you can point to and say "this is totally different, no other animal has anything like this." Yes, your linguist abilities are orders of magnitude more sophisticated than those of most other animals, but even there it is only a matter of degree, not of a fundamental kind.
For a very good treatment of this subject by a highly respected primatologist, see Frans de Waal's recent books. But he isn't alone... until fairly recently it was taboo to say that animals are "intelligent" or "conscious" or "sentient", but this is thankfully beginning to change, and among the current generation of biologists, ethologists and animal cognitive psychologists many consider the notion that animals aren't sentient to be outmoded, or as Frans de Waal puts it, "anthropodenial".
But there is one thing that makes us truly different from all other animals and it's only indirectly related to cognition: for better or for worse we are the only animal that uses and controls fire. It's fire that really defines humans, not our big brains (and fire probably came first; cooking made our calorically expensive large brains possible). And it is fire that may be the end of us, as well.
> for better or for worse we are the only animal that uses and controls fire
Just to nitpick on that one, some wild animals seem to use fire to their advantage, such as birds of prey spreading wildfires. Some others were trained to be able to cook food, and light fire with tools. That said, to my knowledge, none are able to start fire with tools they crafted (I am not really either, to be fair). So this might be true for now, but I do not take it as a given.
I like your last paragraph, though, especially the ending. Nicely put :)
The difficulty with that reasoning is that you can say that you can abstract red, but you can't definitely state that I can abstract red any more than other animals may.
The hilarious part of your example is that the Greeks didn't have words for colours, so couldn't actually talk about it as separate from things that are red.
I think we humans commonly use the word “intelligence” as a placeholder for human-like ability to learn new skills, absorb new knowledge, process said information to filter/transform it, and the ability to apply it. It might help to distinguish effectiveness or usefulness from these capabilities - trees are effective in reproducing and useful perhaps, as are insects. But we wouldn’t consider them to be intelligent per my prior definition, unless you consider their species’ changes in response to selective pressure to be semantically similar to human intelligence. However such changes are passive not deliberate/active/intentional, and so I don’t count them as intelligence. Ultimately it’s just about our definition and semantics.
> However such changes are passive not deliberate/active/intentional
This is a subjective interpretation. Human "intention" is informed by selective pressures as well, both those that have etched themselves into our genetics and those that have influenced mental development.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18736698
Michael Levin's lab are uncovering the physical scientific basis for what a lot of people have always known: life thinks.
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Now then,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_and_Thou
> Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways:
> 1. The attitude of the "I" towards an "It", towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.
> 2. The attitude of the "I" towards "Thou", in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.
We need to learn to relate to Nature as I-Thou (not I-It.) The vast majority of our problem right now is our divorce from Nature and our attempt to relate to Her as I-It.
The good news is that it's fun and easy to return to Nature (and, as Geoff Lawton says, "You can solve all the world's problems in a garden.)
I recommend Toby Hemenway's (RIP) videos: http://tobyhemenway.com/videos/ esp. "How Permaculture Can Save Humanity and the Planet – But Not Civilization" and "Redesigning Civilization with Permaculture".